Bluegrass Mallet Master Puts Cream Of Croquet Through The Hoops

Archie Burchfield is a tobacco and cattle farmer from Stamping Ground, Ky., with arms the size of hickory stumps and hands that have been chapped and torn from a lifetime of hard work.

If you were to guess his sport, you might pick horseshoes, tobacco spitting or slow-pitch softball. It would be a long time before you`d figure that this slow-talking, 49-year-old farmer was a U.S. National Doubles Croquet champion. A lot of people in the sport still can`t believe it.

``You see, we`d only played this (regulation) game about five times,``

said Burchfield, sitting under a cloth canopy at the recent First International Singles Croquet Tournament at the Sonoma-Cutrer Winery near Santa Rosa, Calif. ``My son, Mark, and I were tenant farmers from Kentucky, and most of the people were wealthy. So we just went up to New York in 1982 and won the nationals.``

There have always been two varieties of croquet--back yard and blueblood. Burchfield has managed to cross over from the former to the latter, a bluegrass farmer who beat the bluebloods at their own game. The American croquet world, at least those with hopes of boosting the obscure sport into prime time, couldn`t be happier.

``When people think of croquet, they immediately think of women in crinoline and men in straw boaters,`` said Tom Lufkin, the 59-year-old American codirector of the tournament, in which 22 men and women from the United States, Australia, New Zealand and England are competed. ``We`re trying very hard to get rid of that image, that Gatsby feeling.``

Lufkin, a former programming manager for ABC-TV in Los Angeles, played in the 1950s with Harpo Marx, Louis Jourdan and Tyrone Power on Sam Goldwyn`s courts in Beverly Hills. He thinks the glamor and glory of those days can be marketed to Americans.

``We`re seeing a new interest in minor sports, like cycling,`` said Lufkin. ``I think with the frenetic pace of most of our lives, there`s an interest in something more laid back.``

Jack Osborn, president of the 9-year-old U.S. Croquet Association, has been trying to interest cable TV in the ball-and-mallet game that traces its history to 14th-Century France.

Burchfield has his own ideas about how to make the game more popular.

``I really think croquet won`t go big until it goes to prize money. Nothing creates more interest than money. Look at professional golf. It was nothing until they went to money,`` said Burchfield, whose expenses were picked up, as were others in the tournament, by Brice Jones, president of the Sonoma-Cutrer Winery and Continental Airlines. Burchfield thinks the powers that control croquet are afraid to allow professionalism.

``The upper crust don`t need the money to start with,`` he said. ``And once they go to prize money, their control is gone.``

Ironically, the sport that many Americans associate with the rich and reserved was banned in Boston during the 1890s because of gambling and because of croquet`s generally unsavory reputation. In 1898, a magazine called Living Age pronounced: ``The ingenuity of man has never conceived anything better calculated to bring out all the evil passions of humanity than the so-called game of croquet. . . . It is not long before every honorable feeling, every dictate of morality has been obliterated. The hoop is the gaping jaw of Hades.``

Competitors at the recent tournament were considerably more polite--at least in public. Trying to get two balls to roll twice through six hoops on an 85- by 105-yard field can be unnerving.

The backyard game is generally played with nine hoops and two wooden pegs, often on dirt. That is the game that Archie Burchfield learned to play in Kentucky 26 years ago. He got interested in that game only after some old farmers invited him to play a game, then trounced him.

``They put me behind the wicket and laughed. Those people really aggravated me,`` said Burchfield, who began practicing in secret until he was good enough to beat every one of them. His first experience with regulation, six-hoop croquet sounds like the plot of a Rodney Dangerfield movie.

Burchfield and his son, Mark, had driven a 22-ton load of lettuce from Kentucky to Florida in 1982 when they decided to drop by the Palm Beach Polo and Country Club. They parked their 18-wheeler across the road from the exclusive club, took out their short-handled Kentucky mallets and strolled through the club gates, dressed in blue work pants.

``The first lady who saw us thought we were the caretakers,`` said Burchfield, who tells a story nearly as well as he plays croquet. ``She said, `You can`t go in there, and if you do get in, you`ll be thrown out.` I said, `How come?` And she said, `Your clothes.` I said, `These aren`t the only clothes I`ve got, but they`re about as good as I`ve got.```

That afternoon, father and son purchased a set of ``croquet whites.`` Six months later, they won the national doubles championship.

``You know, people kind of look down on this sport,`` said Burchfield, putting an arm on his listener`s shoulder, and leaning forward for emphasis.

``But I do love croquet. It`s a tougher game than everybody thinks. And who would have ever thought that this short mallet would have got us to Palm Beach, Wellington and Hilton Head?``